We always enjoy our annual review of the year at Retraction Watch, and 2025 is no exception. But we’re more excited about what lies ahead than what we already accomplished.
We’re on track for our second-highest year for pageviews — 6.6 million. This year we brought you more than 300 posts. Among our most-read stories this year include ones on metrics: The most-read of the year was on universities whose publication metrics show signs of “questionable authorship practices.” Also among the most-read stories was one on the 20 journals that lost their impact factors this year for citation issues.
Fakery was also a theme in 2025. A story on a Springer Nature book full of fake references and one on dozens of papers with fake company affiliations were among the most popular of the year.
But the most popular doesn’t always mean the most important. We exposed universities in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia that require their students to cite other university papers to graduate. We’ve kept an eye on the Office of Research Integrity and its misconduct rulings – or lack thereof. We’ve reported misconduct cases settled under the False Claims Act, and written about a researcher suing her former institution to dispute misconduct findings.
We’ve also covered retractions that arose from the discovery of experiments gone awry, which serve as examples of the scientific process working as it should.
The stories weren’t all serious. An April Fool’s joke about a patient whose heart was in his abdomen made its way into the literature and was retracted after our coverage. A paper about sex robot research was retracted after a robotics expert named in the paper found it and confirmed he does not, in fact, study sex robots.
We keep track of a lot of trends as well: Our list of retracted COVID-19 papers is now up to 643, mass resignations at journals is up to 47, and the leaderboard, which is always among our most-viewed pages, saw some changes this year. And as we noted last week, the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, developed and maintained by Anna Abalkina, has more than 400 journals on the list.
We published articles elsewhere, including American Scientist, The Atlantic, The Conversation, Inquisitive, Quillette, Science, and Times Higher Education. And Retraction Watch stories are now featured in The Scientist, as part of a syndication arrangement.
Our work has continued to appear in mainstream media outlets, including ABC (Australia), The Economist, Le Monde, Nature, The New York Times, NRC Handelsblad, Science Friday, The Times of India, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
We were invited to give dozens of talks all around the globe, including at research integrity conferences in Sydney and at Oxford; to organizations including the National Academies and the Cochrane Collaboration; and at universities including Columbia and Georgia State.
And Retraction Watch received the Council of Science Editors’ top honor, the 2025 Award for Meritorious Achievement, which our cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky accepted at the organization’s annual meeting.
The year held important internal developments, too.
We hired a full-time team for Retraction Watch, with managing editor Kate Travis and staff reporter Avery Orrall joining us in January and staff reporter Alicia Gallegos joining us in December.
The Retraction Watch Database now includes 63,000 retractions. We’re always thrilled to see how researchers use the database and the studies that cite it. Our research director Alison Abritis celebrated 10 years with Retraction Watch this year. She and associate researcher Gordon Sullivan were joined by assistant database researcher Noah Knox to increase our capacity to keep the database robust and up to date.
While this essential work is the core of Retraction Watch, we’ve always had a bigger vision for what our parent nonprofit, The Center for Scientific Integrity, could do. And that vision came to fruition this year with the launch of several new projects.
The Medical Evidence Project is investigating problems in the medical literature that directly affect human health. Led by James Heathers, the project is leveraging the tools of forensic metascience to identify problems in scientific articles. Veteran editor Alice Dreger joined the team this fall to serve as the project’s editor.
Our Sleuths in Residence Program expanded our team to include David Robert Grimes and Mariana Ribeiro, who are bringing their research expertise to the dozens of tips we receive. The sleuths’ work appeared in articles on Google Scholar gaming, an analysis of papers by a top physicist in Kazakhstan, and a report by the World Bank with fake references.
The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund, launched with Bik’s generous donation of the proceeds of her Einstein Award, provides financial resources for sleuths and other science integrity advocates.
We’re thrilled by this growth and progress, and look forward to focusing on further developing these projects in 2026, all of which center on keeping individuals, institutions and publishers accountable to upholding the integrity of the research enterprise.
None of this would have been possible without you, our readers, who value and support our work. You can make a tax-deductible donation to keep us going for the next 15 years.
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Here’s to 2026!
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].